With Mayawati dominating the political centre stage, it was easy in the last few years to forget the wheelchair-bound man who founded the BSP. Yet her very success testifies to the political instinct that marked Kanshi Ram’s career. With some caveats, Kanshi Ram gets the credit of extending the Ambedkarite vision of giving voice to the Dalit.

His managerial skills allowed Kanshi Ram to achieve more than those who saw themselves as B.R. Ambedkar’s natural legatees. He perceived the huge gap that existed between the aspirations of the myriad communities that comprised what he termed the ‘Bahujan samaj’, and the ability of those warring parties and individuals who politically represented them to meet those expectations. By creating the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984, he hoped to fill that vacuum. It was an audacious project that took years of assiduous political activity, especially in the great heartland of Uttar Pradesh. True, the rise of the BSP can in part be attributed to the steady decline of the Congress in UP, but without a political manager like Kanshi Ram, that opportunity wouldn’t have been exploited so effectively.

There was, without doubt, a brashness about his political style — and his famous face-off with journalists in 1996 was evidence of this. It was Kanshi Ram, too, who made brazen patronage and populism an integral part of identity politics, something UP especially suffers so much from now. But these attributes didn’t stop him from realising the value of reaching beyond core constituencies. Mayawati’s conscious wooing of the upper castes is of a piece with this thinking and the BSP, that appears a top runner in the coming UP polls, can still be called Kanshi Ram’s party.